Being
被(Bèi)
Related buzz words:
Being employed/being increased/being married

The Chinese character "被", bei, means being… Being employed refers to the situation in which young people who have failed to find become claimed as employees of unknown companies; being increased is a term used by netizens to refer to when the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) claimed the average salary of Chinese people had increased by 12.9 percent in the first half of 2009 compared to 2008. Many internet users expressed their doubt about the salary increase, claiming that their salaries had "been increased" by the NBS.

The phenomenon of placing the character for "being" in front of another word is, at the essence, an indicator that Chinese people, be they college students or ordinary employees, have little say. To show their students are "well-educated", colleges will state their graduates have all "been employed" though in fact most of their graduates cannot find jobs. And because only people working for the government, governmental agencies, public institutions and state-owned enterprises are covered by the NBS's survey, it's natural for the salaries of people employed by private companies to "be increased" when they are lumped into the same category with state employees.

"Being" has recently been used to cover a bizarre phenomenon. While the hukou records of people registered were being sorted, some local police stations ticked the box "married" for people whose marriage status had not been reported nor recorded. Those people, in fact, were subject to "being married".

Another example is Jin Yong, China's most popular writer, who was repeatedly claimed by some media outlets to "be dead", indicating the low moral standards of certain Chinese media outlets.

Related links

NBS Publishes CPI Calculation Process